The Essex Serpent (20 page)

4

Joanna went to All Saints in the morning and found her father there. It had been a good night, she thought, remembering how she and Martha had pored over plans for new homes in London where the water was clean and ran in copper pipes. She’d played the piano well enough, she’d worn her good dress, she’d eaten an orange (her nails were still stained with its peel). True, it had worn her mother out, and her father that morning had been silent, but then (he said) he always had such a lot of thinking to do.

She found him stooped in the shadows with a chisel in his hand. With furious movements he worked at the serpent coiled on the arm of its pew; over the years the Essex oak had ossified and blackened, and though the creature’s folded wings had come away and lay on the stone floor, it still grinned at its adversary, baring its teeth.

‘No!’ said Joanna – imagine destroying something that had taken so much skill! – and ran to the pew, and pulling at his sleeve said, ‘You can’t do that! It isn’t even yours!’

‘I am in charge! I’ll do what I think’s right!’ he said, sounding not at all like her father, but like a boy who couldn’t get his own way; then as if he heard his own petulance he straightened his shirt and said, ‘It’s no good, Jojo, it shouldn’t be here – look: can’t you see it doesn’t belong?’

But Joanna had stroked the tip of its tail since she could barely walk, and seeing its severed wings she wept and said, ‘You shouldn’t go breaking things! You’re not allowed!’

Her tears were so rare that on any other day they might have stayed his hand, but William Ransome felt beset by enemies and this one at least he could destroy. All night, sleepless, they’d come to him: the crouching black-browed doctor, Cracknell with his moleskins hanging, a roomful of schoolgirls dismantled by laughter, the Blackwater parting, and there on the mud Cora standing sternly, and behind her with its heart beating behind its wet skin the Essex Serpent … he filed off a winking eye and said, ‘Go home, Joanna, go back to your schoolbooks, and don’t meddle.’

Joanna stood tall beside him and considered bringing her fist down on his bent head, feeling for the first time the helpless rage of a child knowing itself wiser and more just than its parent. Then behind them the church doors opened and the light came in, and there with her red hair burning was Naomi Banks. She was breathless with running, and her hands were coated with mud to the elbow. ‘It’s happened again!’ she said, and her voice rang in the vault. ‘It’s come again: I told you it would – didn’t I tell you! Didn’t I say it would!’

By the time Will reached the marsh a handful had gathered round the bundle lying there. Cracknell’s head was turned so far to his left – and upward, craning, as though looking into the face of his destroyer – that it was immediately apparent (they said) that his neck was broken. ‘Wait for the coroner,’ said Will, stooping to close the filmy eyes: ‘He’d been ill a while.’ There on the man’s coat, placed precisely on his stomach and between two torn pockets, were a silver fork and a grey stone pierced with a hole. ‘Who did this?’ he said, looking up at the faces of his flock: ‘Who put these things here, and why?’ But they all shrank away, one after the other, not admitting to anything, saying that they knew there was something there, had known it all along, and that they’d all best lock their doors whenever the tide was high. One woman crossed herself, receiving a stern look from her minister, who long ago had trained them out of superstition.

‘It’s torn off one of his brass buttons,’ said Banks, tousling his daughter’s head, but no-one paid much attention: it was a miracle Cracknell had any buttons at all.

‘Our friend has passed away only because he was ill, and now he’s gone to glory,’ said Will, hoping this last was true: ‘He would have wandered out at night for air, or got lost and confused. It’s not the time to talk of snakes and monsters – has someone sent for the doctor? – thank you, yes: cover his face – let him rest in peace – isn’t it what we all hope for in the end?’

On the outskirts of the small crowd Francis Seaborne stood, now and then patting the pocket of his jacket where he’d put a shiny button on which an anchor was embossed. Someone had begun to cry, but Frankie had lost interest: he was looking out to the horizon, where blue clouds banked up all around. They were so like mountain ranges receding into mist he thought perhaps the village had been plucked up out of Essex and dropped, wholesale, into a foreign country.

5

Stella flinched under the stethoscope and breathed under instruction: as deeply as she could, and never mind the coughing. The fit, when it came, was not one of her worst, but bad enough: it threw her forward in the chair, it let loose a little urine; she called out for a fresh handkerchief.

‘It’s not always so bad,’ she said, dabbing at her mouth, feeling sorry for the three men surveying her sombrely: how alarmed they were! Had they themselves never been sick? There was Will, who out of distress or discomfort could barely meet her eye. And there was the Imp, who stood far back in the corner, his black gaze even from that distance missing nothing. There, too – the elder of the men and the most gracious, having had longer to cultivate a soothing manner at bedsides both tawdry and grand – was Dr Butler, who withdrew the stethoscope, and with a gentle hand tugged his patient’s blouse into place. ‘No doubt in my mind of tuberculosis,’ he said, seeing – as Luke had promised – the pretty flush on the woman’s cheek: ‘Though naturally we’ll take a sputum sample, in order to be certain.’ His full white beard compensated for a high domed head which was completely bald (it was said by his students that his thoughts moved at such a speed that over the years their friction made any hair growth impossible).

‘Captain among these men of death,’ said Stella into her handkerchief, whispering to the forget-me-nots embroidered there. There was no need for all this: she’d have told them months ago, if anyone had asked. The high open window showed the white sky splitting open to show a fragment of blue. ‘I did that myself,’ she said confidingly (not that anyone heard).

‘Certain? How?’ said Will, wondering if the room really did darken at that moment, or if it was only his own dread. There, beneath the couch where she lay still smiling, he imagined something in the shadows moving, and with it the scent of the river. ‘How can you be sure? There has been none of it in her family – none – Stella, you must tell them.’ But how could he have missed it – had he really been so blinded by what had come to Aldwinter? ‘Flu, the doctor said: it had gone round the village, and everyone after was weak …’

‘Family’s got nothing to do with it,’ said Luke. ‘It doesn’t pass from father to son. It’s just the tuberculosis bacteria, nothing more than that.’ His dislike for Will came to the fore, and he said with nasty precision: ‘Bacteria, Reverend, are microorganisms that can carry infectious disease.’

‘I’d like to be certain,’ said Dr Butler again, casting a troubled glance at his colleague, who to be sure was not known for his manners but was rarely so rude: ‘Mrs Ransome, can you bear to cough again – just a little – and spit into a dish?’

‘I’ve birthed five children,’ said Stella, with a little flash of temper: ‘Two of them dead. Spitting is nothing to me.’ It was a steel dish they brought, and in it the fragment of sky showed clearly. She obliterated it with a brownish substance drawn painfully up from her lungs, and handed it to Dr Butler with a gracious tip of her head.

‘What are you going to do with it?’ said Will: ‘How will it help?’ And how oblivious she was to it all: how calm! It was not natural – it was a kind of hysteria: shouldn’t she weep, and ask him to sit by her, and hold her hand?

‘We can now stain the bacillus so that it’s easily visible under a microscope,’ said Dr Butler, enthusiasm making him brisk: ‘And it may be that we are wrong, and that Mrs Ransome has pneumonia, or a milder disease –’

A microscope!
thought Stella. Joanna had taken to asking for one, wanting to see for herself how apples and onions were built of cells just as houses were built of bricks. ‘I want to see it,’ she said. ‘I want you to show me.’

It was not an unusual request, thought Dr Butler, though ordinarily it was the young men so intent on looking the enemy square in the eye. Whoever would’ve thought this slight woman with her silver hair would be so sanguine. Though it was part delirium, of course: the curious state of detached peace so many patients reached had come to her early.

‘If you can wait an hour, I’ll bring it to you,’ he said, seeing the husband begin to demur: ‘Though I hope, of course, there’ll be nothing to see.’

‘Stella,’ said Will, imploring: ‘Stella, do you need to?’ It was all happening so fast: surely only minutes had passed since he’d walked home in winter from World’s End with Cracknell’s gift of rabbits hanging from his belt, and seen his family lamp-lit and waiting, and now it was all breaking up in pieces. He closed his eyes and saw in the darkness the bright eye of the Essex Serpent, gleaming, gleeful.

‘Pray for me then,’ said Stella out of pity, and because she wanted it. Dr Butler left with the covered dish, and the Imp followed; Will knelt beside her chair. But what place did prayer have, there among the vials and lenses that unpicked every mystery? What ought he to pray for, besides? The disease must’ve lodged in there long ago while they went on in happy ignorance – should he ask that the clock’s hands go back, and if so why stop there: why not ask for the raising up of every last one of Aldwinter’s dead? Was Stella really so singular and precious God might intervene on her behalf when generally He kept Himself to Himself? But there were the words of the Sunday schoolboy making mischief, he knew – their prayers were not for favours but submission. ‘Not our will but thine be done,’ he said. ‘God give us grace.’

When they came back it was sombrely, and Will was taken aside, as if it was his disease and not hers. The message was relayed like a game of Chinese whispers, so that by the time it reached her – ‘Love, you aren’t well, but they’re going to help’ – the truth had dwindled to nothing. ‘Consumption,’ said Stella, animated by the news: ‘The White Death. Phthisis. Scrofula. I know its names. What’s that you’re holding? Give it to me.’ It was the glass slide on which her future was etched, and after some persuasion the microscope was brought, and she said, ‘Is that all? Just like grains of rice.’

Another coughing fit took her, and left her dazed, so that lying with her cheek on the rough arm of the couch she could only overhear her future unfolding.

‘She should be isolated as much as possible, and the children should be sent away when her symptoms worsen,’ said Luke, dispensing with pity: what use was that to a deadly disease?

‘Take your time, Reverend: it’s a shock, I know,’ said Dr Butler. ‘But modern medicine can do so much: I personally would recommend injections of tuberculin, which Robert Koch has recently introduced in Germany –’

Will – a little dazed still – thought of needles piercing Stella’s fragile skin and fought against nausea. He turned to Luke Garrett, and said, ‘And you? What do you say? Are you going to bring out your knives?’

‘Perhaps a therapeutic pneumothorax –’

‘Dr Garrett!’ Dr Butler was shocked. ‘I wouldn’t hear of it – only two or three undertaken so far and none in this country: now is not the time to test the waters.’

‘I don’t want you
touching
her,’ said Will, feeling nauseous again, recalling how the Imp had crouched whispering over Joanna.

‘Mrs Ransome, let me explain,’ said Garrett, turning to the patient: ‘It’s simple enough, and I know you will understand. The infected lung is collapsed by the introduction of air: it lies like a deflated balloon in the chest cavity, and in doing so the symptoms are greatly relieved and a healing process can begin –’

‘She is not one of your cadavers: she’s my wife – you talk as if she’s offal in a butcher’s window!’

Luke, losing patience, said: ‘Are you really going to let your pride and ignorance endanger her further? Are you so afraid of the age you were born into? Would you rather your children were all raddled with smallpox and your water full of cholera?’

‘Gentlemen’ – Dr Butler was distressed – ‘be reasonable: Reverend Ransome, when you brought her here she became my patient, and I advise you to give injections of tuberculin your consideration. You needn’t decide yet, of course – only sooner rather than later, before the haemorrhaging begins – which it will, I am afraid.’

‘What about me?’ Stella raised herself upon her elbow, and smoothing back her hair said, frowning: ‘Aren’t you going to ask me? Will – isn’t this body mine? Isn’t it my disease?’